


In the Early Hours

by yet_intrepid



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Post-Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Siblings, Snow and Ice, Twelve Days of Fic-mas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-08 23:02:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8866873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: “Get back to the base!” Leia yells again. The last reluctant Akurians fall into retreat, disappearing into the thick of the falling snow, and Luke starts backpedaling too. He almost trips over Leia, sending them both off-balance, and they have to dodge fire as Luke fumbles to get control of his lightsaber again.
“We can’t!” Leia yells at him over the noise. “They’ll follow us back; we can’t afford to change bases!”
(Or, galactic liberation is a slow process.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [estelraca](https://archiveofourown.org/users/estelraca/gifts).



> For a prompt from estelraca: "Luke and Leia post-RotJ being overwhelmed siblings with the galaxy on their shoulders."
> 
> Title is from "Songs of Adrian Zielinski" by Czeslaw Milosz:
> 
>  
> 
> _I thought my youth would last forever,_   
>  _That I would always be the same._   
>  _And what remains? Fear in the early hours._   
>  _I peer at myself as at a plaque of blank, gray stone._

“Luke, behind you!” Leia calls.

Luke swings instinctively, lightsaber humming, to block a barrage of laser bolts. Leia crouches in the snow behind him, leaning out just far enough to return fire.

It’s been a long night. They’ve been on Akuria II for a week now and just pulled their first raid on the leftover Imperial forces. Now the sun’s coming up and they’re on the run. Not the most successful mission, on the whole.

“Get back!” Leia yells to their Akurian companions. “Get back to the base!”

The Imperials keep advancing. Blast it, Luke thinks, as he catches a shot just before it can hit Leia’s shoulder, they’re supposed to be done with all this—the Emperor is dead, they celebrated it on Endor and again on Coruscant when Leia summoned the Senate. But there is so much left to do, so much of the galaxy still under Imperial control, and Luke wonders if it will ever truly end.

“Get back to the base!” Leia yells again. The last reluctant Akurians fall into retreat, disappearing into the thick of the falling snow, and Luke starts backpedaling too. He almost trips over Leia, sending them both off-balance, and they have to dodge fire as Luke fumbles to get control of his lightsaber again.

“We can’t!” Leia yells at him over the noise. “They’ll follow us back; we can’t afford to change bases!”

“Okay,” Luke shouts back. “So what do we do?”

Leia points across the open stretch of snow to their left, towards a cluster of trees and rocks. Luke hesitates a second, but reinforcements are coming in for the troopers, and Leia never steers him wrong.

He breathes in the Force and strikes out, his eyes half-closed and his senses alive. The rain of blaster bolts thickens and he can hear Leia breathing hard behind him, shooting and running as he spins the lightsaber like a shield. It’s so far, it’s so far—but they’ll make it, Luke is sure. Leia never steers him wrong.

“Triangle-three to base, do you copy,” Leia pants into her comlink. “Triangle-three to base, come in!”

They’re almost there. Luke doesn’t have a clue what they’ll do when they get to cover. Climb a tree and ambush? Hide? Get shot?

That last one’s looking more and more likely. Force, he got off Hoth just to die on some other ice planet? Come _on_ , Luke thinks, and lobs a laser bolt right back at the shooter.

“Yes!” Leia exclaims, behind him, then leans out to get a shot off. “Yes, same coordinates, a little east—some vegetation—yes—no, no attack, just pick us up in something fast—copy, yes.”

They break into the treeline. “How long?” Luke calls to Leia, who’s now ahead of him as he turns to run properly forwards for the first time.

She relays his question into the comm and keeps running, twisting through the trees. “Ten harsits? What does that—no, standard time!”

Luke swings his lightsaber over his shoulder to block a blast that made it through the trees. The Imps are getting closer, starting to flank them, and he scans the area desperately. Ten harsits might not be long, but they probably don’t have it.

Leia’s still arguing over the comlink when he sights it—a tall outcropping of rocks and a dip behind it. He nudges at Leia, then grabs her hand.

“Coruscant time,” she’s saying, “I can’t convert—” and Luke shushes her as he pulls her into a run. With a last cautionary glance over his shoulder, he dives behind the outcropping, Leia tumbling after him.

They keep tumbling, long seconds of bumps and jolts and snow leaking in, then thump to a halt at the bottom of a small ravine.

“Ow—” Leia starts, and Luke interrupts her with a finger over his lips. The Imps are passing.

The two of them huddle close under the overhang, still and silent, and Luke hopes desperately that the snow is falling fast enough to cover their tracks. Or that the Imps are dense enough to miss it, that’d work too.

His heart pounds, sweat trickling down his cold skin, Leia’s hand still pressed in his. The footsteps start to fade.

When they’re gone, Leia gets a grip on her blaster and edges out of cover to look for any leftover scouts. “Clear,” she whispers back, after a moment, then hits the button on her comlink again. “Triangle-three to base?”

Luke takes a couple deep breaths as she finishes the conversation, trying to suck in calmness with the air. Snow is creeping between his gloves and his sleeves and sinking into his collar, and it builds a weird restlessness inside him. Even after all that time on Hoth, he can’t get used to this. It isn’t _right_.

“Copy that,” Leia says into the comlink. “We’ll be waiting. Yeah. Over and out.”

“How long?” Luke asks again.

“Twenty-six standard minutes,” Leia reports. “Or something close, anyway. Not counting how long it takes for them to find us.”

“Okay,” Luke says. “Thanks, Leia.”

She snorts. “You’re the one who saved our asses by finding this spot, laserbrain. Thank _you_.”

 “We’re a good team, huh.” He slips an arm around her shoulders, and they sit quietly for a moment, squeezing together for warmth.

“I didn’t think it would be like this,” Leia says, finally. “I mean, I knew it would, but it didn’t register, really. I thought when we’d won—”

“When we won, that we’d have won.” Luke nods. “That it’d be over.”

“Right,” she says. “I don’t know, Luke. I thought I’d either die fighting this war or else I’d go back to—well, to Alderaan.”

Luke is quiet, but he tightens his arm around her shoulders. She still doesn’t talk about it much, and he doesn’t want to say the wrong thing.

“But it’s not just that,” Leia goes on. “Alderaan, I mean. It’s that the emperor is dead, he’s dead, and we’re still running for our lives. Hiding on ice planets, can’t go to sleep without a blaster in reach.”

“I know,” Luke murmurs. “It’s like—like the world will never be normal again.”

“I don’t think it ever was.” She leans her head on his shoulder. “I think we were just further away from, from everything.”

 “It was almost easier,” Luke confesses. “Not before I got involved, obviously that was easier. But when the enemy was—big, and visible, and everywhere. When it seemed like either we’d lose, or we’d win and have it over.”

Leia’s comlink crackles and an Akurian accent comes through. “Circle-eight to triangle-three?”

“This is triangle-three,” she answers, and Luke’s heart aches at the weariness in her voice. “What’s the ETA?”

“Point-five harsits, more or less. Are you safe to signal your location with a flare?”

Leia looks at Luke. He nods, digging around in his pack for a flare.

“Affirmative,” says Leia. “See you in point-five, circle-eight.”

“Copy that. Over and out.”

Leia takes the flare when Luke holds it out. “Thanks for the heart-to-heart,” she says, wryly, as she moves out from under the overhang to prep it.

“Anytime,” he says. “I mean it, Leia.”

“I might take you up on that,” she says. “You know, sometime when we’re _not_ cornered by Imps.”

“Are we ever not cornered by Imps?” Luke says.

She looks at him then, affection softening the lines of her tired face. “Sometimes we corner them instead,” she says, and sets off the flare. 


End file.
